Back to the Future: Effector Fate during T Cell Exhaustion

Exhausted CD8(+) T cells adopt a functionally attenuated state but still confer a certain degree of pathogen control. Chen et al. (2019), Hudson et al. (2019), and Zander et al. (2019) assign the lasting maintenance of this restrained pathogen control to an equilibrium of effector-like, transitory, terminal, and memory-like exhausted T cells.